Dedicated to mobilizing people working in scientific fields to become active in
agitating for science, technology, and medicine that would serve social needs
rather than military and corporate interests.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Scientists as Citizens: Education as a weapon of intellectual self-defense

"Before
I could read, my grandfather read to me from Bad Bishop Brown’s Science and
History for Girls and Boys. My grandfather believed that at a minimum every
socialist worker should be familiar with cosmology, evolution, and history. I
never separated history, in which we are active participants, from science, the
finding out how things are. My family had broken with organized religion five
generations back, but my father sat me down for Bible study every Friday
evening because it was an important part of the surrounding culture and
important to many people, a fascinating account of how ideas develop in
changing conditions, and because every atheist should know it as well as believers
do."~ Richard Levins

Introduction

In this first blog issue of Science for the People, we provide a brief
historical overview on the role of radical scientific workersin the early part of the 20th century. By placing the role of
scientists in a historical context, we seek to understand how scientists within
the political left have in the past engaged with ordinary people through
popular education activities. Understanding this history is of crucial
importance to the present day since we are facing some of the most pressing
societal issues, most notably climate change and the rapid loss of
biodiversity.

Popular science writers have
traditionally focused their attention on communicating scientific ideas to the
public in the hopes of galvanizing support for science. While these efforts
should be applauded, they fall short in some important ways. They generally
seek to promote changes within the established social order, either by
influencing governmental agencies or individuals through self-education
literature, but fail to addres how scientific knowledge is built from the
ground-up so that individuals can attain the self-confidence required to change
the existing social order. Contrary to the mainstream of Popular Science
writers, Science for the People aims to provide ordinary people with scientific
ways of thinking in order to create alternative forms of self-managed
societies.

Science for the People Magazine Covers, 1974, 1970.

British
Science Writers

Lancelot Hogben

Since the Victorian era, popular
education played a key role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the
public. Scientists engaged deeply with the public by displaying their most
recent scientific discoveries in front of sold-out audiences. The status of the
scientific worker was both as a celebrity and specialist. It was the advent of
the mass printing press in the 19th century that soon expanded the dissemination
of information into the public sphere. In the decades that followed, science
emerged as a professional discipline with the growth of universities,
government research institutions, and private industry. As there was greater
emphasis on specialization within the sciences, popular science declined in the
years that followed. However, a small fringe of scientific workers continued to
engage with the public, albeit for different reasons. We can identify three
main strands of popular science writers that dominated much of the 20th
century.

From the beginning, popular science
writers had primarily been concerned with the establishment of science as a
professional discipline that served the purposes of government and industry.
In the early years, science had not been recognized as a discipline and thus
well-known scientists urged government and industry to acknowledge their work
through research funding and the establishment of academic displines. But it was
the links between applied science and imperialism that enabled scientists to
gain government funding for research. While scientists disagreed on the best
way of promoting science to the public, Britisch science writer Herbert Wells
believed in the ability of science to transform society. In particular, Wells
was interested in promoting a rationalist worldview that pushed forward the
idea of Darwinism. In his classic work “Outline of History”, Wells offered a
broad overview of Darwinian evolution and legitimized the science of biology by
discounting the neo-vitalist movement, the notion that the living body could
surpass its own physical laws, that had preceded much of popular science
writing.

Attempts to reconcile science and
religion spurred another important movement in popular science writing. Major
discoveries in physics and cosmology led some prominent scientists to assess
the impact of their scientific findings on religion. One such scientist was the
well-known cosmologist Arthur Eddington who was the first scientist to
experimentally verify Albert Einstein’s predictions. As a Quaker, Arthur
Eddington challenged materialism which dominated much of physics in the 19th
century. In his popular book “The Nature of the Physical World”, Eddington
discussed the philosophical and religious implications of the new physics.
Eddington suggested that in addition to materialism, consciousness and the mind
were integral parts of our reality. This view of reconciling science and
religion was generally favored by an older generation of scientists in the
beginning part of the 20th century.

John S. Haldane, 1910 via Wikimedia Commons

Yet, by the 1930’s there was increasing
awareness about the moral compass of a scientifically managed society. While
previous generations of science writers wanted changes within the existing
social structures, principally government and industry, a small group of
politically Leftist scientists wanted a scientifically based society managed by
ordinary people. These scientists represented a younger generation within the
British political left movements. Some of these prominent scientists included
the physicist John Bernal, the mathematician Hyman Levy, and the biologists
John Haldane and Lancelot Hogben. While these younger scientists critiqued the
previous generation of science writers for linking religious values into
popular science writing, their primary aim was to make science accessible to
ordinary people but also to use it as a weapon of intellectual self-defense so
as to organize society based on scientific principles. Most notable defenders
of these ideas were the biologists Haldane and Hogben. Besides being a
well-known evolutionary biologist, Haldane had written popular science articles
for the Communist Daily Workers, where he frequently wrote critical articles on
the misuse of science in the case of poison gas during WWI and eugenics.

Although overshadowed by Haldane, it
was the biologist Lancelot
Hogben whom became one of the most prolific science
writers of his generation. Hogben was a towering intellectual figure whose work
spanned the scientific and political domains. As a biologist, Hogben’s work
included mathematical contributions to human and medical genetics. He was
actively engaged in the Nature-Nurture debate with geneticist RA Fisher.
Hogben’s work challenged the eugenists, most notably Fisher, by stressing the
importance of non-linear interactions between heredity and the environment. As
a compartive physiologist, Hogben’s research on the endocrinology of Xenopus
laevis (the African clawed toad) showed that when female frogs are injected
with urine from pregnant women in their hindlegs they ovulate. This served as
an indicator that the urine of the woman containing the hormone chorionic
gonadotropin caused the frogs to ovulate. Hogben’s laboratory developed
protocols for the standard pregnancy test, commonly referred to as the Hogben
pregnancy test. In the latter part of his professional career, Hogben’s work
focused on the foundations of statistical theory, in particular on statistical
inference methods in human genetics.

African clawed toad pair, by TimVickers, via Wikimedia Commons

In the political sphere, Hogben
belonged to the radical left-wing tradition of British scientific
intellectuals. While commonly associated with Marxists, Hogben did not subscribe
to the rigidity of the Communist Party. Rather, Hogben called for socialism in
his early years and promoted scientific humanist later in his life. Hogben grew
up as the son of fundamentalist Methodists parents in whose household books
were banned and daily activities included spreading of the Gospel to save souls
from going to Hell. However, it was scarlet fever at the age of 14 that forced
Hogben to stay at home. This proved to be a pivotal moment in his life since
books left by his cousin and books from the public library allowed him to
self-educate himself in natural history and zoology. While in Tottenham County
School, Hogben developed his interest in biology and showed exceptional
academic abillities. Meanwhile, his friendships with working-class kids from
the neighborhood shaped his left-wing political consciousness.

At the age of 17, Hogben won a
prestigious scholarship to study at Cambridge University (Trinity). Hogben remembers
this time,

“As an education institution, Trinity was ideally fitted to foster
my intellectual development. Perhaps because of an overdose of family prayers,
I had acquired a lifelong reistance to information transmitted by the spoken
word”.

At Cambridge, Hogben became intellectually influenced by a small number
of important physiologists including Walter Fletcher, A.V. Hill, and Keith
Lucas. However, it was the
logician and philospher Bertrand Russell whose lectures on the philosophy of
science and political activism inspired Hogben intellectually. In 1914, Hogben
began to serve for the Quaker’s War Victim’s Continent during WWI as a
non-combatant building homes for homeless French families and as a medical aid
for the Friends Ambulance Unit. Reflecting back on this period, Hogben writes,

“I already knew of the Quakers taking an active part in the emancipation of the
slaves, that they regarded military service as contrary to the profession of a
Christian and that they proclaimed no dogma to which a modernist could not
subscribe.”

However by 1916, Hogben made the political choice not to use his
work for exemption from military service when conscription was introduced. Just
like Russell, Hogben became a conscientious objector and served time in jail
for his political actions.

While at Cambridge, Hogben met Enid
Charles and they would get married by 1917. Charles was an accomplished
mathematician and committed feminist. Exceptionally gifted, Charles won the
“math tripos’ examinations at Cambridge, exceeding her male counterparts.
Despite this accomplishment she was barred from receiving a university degree
from Cambridge and spent a year in a Liverpool settlement gaining a diploma in
the social sciences. While she could have acquired a well-paying civil service
job, she opted for taking a low paying job as an organizer for the women’s unit
of the trade union movement. After obtaining her doctorate in physiology, she
shifted her interest to demography. In collaboration with R. R. Kucyznski, she
would develop new statistical techniques in the study of differential fertility.
In 1934, Charles garnered international attention for her book “The Twilight of
Parenthood”, in which she projected that fertility rates in the UK would continue
to drop thereby challenging eugenics.

As a popularizer of science, Hogben
became well known for several books most notably “Mathematics for the Million”.
In his 650-page classic book, Hogen traverses the reader from Euclidian geometry
all the way through calculus, including differentiation and integration. The
book became a bestseller and was intended to boost the self-confidence of
ordinary people in their abillity to understand mathematical concepts. Hogben’s
genius was to explain mathematical ideas in plain language such that the reader
was able to logically follow principles against the historical background at
which they emerged.

In discussing mathematical pedagogy,
Hogben writes,

“The customary way of writing a book about mathematics is to
show how each step follows logically from the one before without telling you
what use there will be in taking it. This book is written to show you how each
step follows historically from the step before and what use it will be to you
or someone else if it is taken. The first method repels many people who are
intelligent and socially alive, because intelligent people are suspicious of
mere logic, and people who are socially alive regard the human brain as an
instrument for social activity”.

Unlike many writers of his day,
Hogben’s educational strategy was to build the scientific knowledge of ordinary
people from the ground up so that they wouldn’t need to take anything for
granted by the elite, intellectual establishment. This strategy was so radical
in its purpose that it not only served ordinary people with scientific
understanding but also enabled them to use this knowledge to manage their own
affairs.

Science
for the People: United States

The anti-war movement of the 1960’s
and 1970’s sparked a new period in which left-wing scientists began to engage
in important societal issues. Left-wing intellectuals increasingly questioned
the role that universities played in society. This led to the formation of
Science for the People in 1967, a national organization that started with a
research strike in MIT protesting the military research presence on campus. As
part of the antiwar activities, several members of Science for the People
collective went to Vietnam to investigate war crimes committed against
Vietnamese peasant communities, many of whom sufferred birth defects due the
application of the chemical herbicide Agent Orange. Furthermore, Science for
the People was actively engaged in debate surrounding the Green Revolution and
genetic engineering. One prominent scientist that emerged from this era was
Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard. The events of the Vietnam War and the Women’s
Liberation Movement forced her to reconsider her role as a scientist in society.
As a consequence, she spent the following decades challenging the ideological
roots of sociobiology and also took on the issue of gender inequality in the
workplace, particularly the subservient role that women were given by their
male colleagues in the university.

By the 1980’s, NWAEG (New World
Agriculture and Ecology Group) emerged as the sister organization of Science for
People mainly working in Nicaragua. As part of NWAEG, scientific workers went
to Nicaragua to assist the Sandanista’s at the National Autonomous University
in Managua. NWAEG members conducted research and taught various courses in
agricultural ecology. This proved to be an important period in US history, when citizens of the oppressor country voluntarily travelled to Nicaragua to show solidarity with the victims of US terrorism.

Vision
for the future: Science for People

We have provided a brief historical
overview of radical scientific workers in both Britain and the United States
that were actively engaged in popular educational activities. It’s important
that we take note of this history in order to address some of the most pressing
environmental and social issues of our time. The slogan “Educate and Organize”
remains as poignent today as it was more than a century ago.